She’s also a bow-and-sword wielding, comfortable-dress-wearing tomboy to boot, more enthralled with riding around the highlands on her trusty stallion, Angus, than practicing how to be a proper future Queen with her mother. So, both the over-excited tiny girl knight inside of me, and the grumbling, jaded critic that is my adult guise, are pleased to inform you that Brave is very, very good.Īs you may have gleaned by now, Brave tells the story of plucky Princess Merida, firstborn to a king of vague Olde Timey Scotland. That is a tremendous price to ask of any movie, especially a high-budget movie, and one from a studio that must hit so many parts of the ambiguous (and dubious) “family” demographic. The little girl inside of me who was once Joan of Arc for Halloween (ask my mother about the grey Eileen Fisher sweater I stretched out because it ‘looked like chainmaile’), who once built a sword out of PVC pipe, foam, a dead tennis ball, and duct tape, and who devoured Tamora Pierce’s Lioness Quartet like a starving person, needed Brave to be so many things.

While it’s needless to explain that we’re fans of Pixar for their general quality and content (we can politely forget about the Cars franchise), it meant something different, something special, to have a female-oriented (and female-sourced) vehicle as their next big feature.

Like myself, and our chief editor, many readers of our site may have found themselves attaching undue importance to Disney/Pixar’s Brave.

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